A new image: The boy, now seven, hurries down a dirt path, his wild red hair matted to his forehead. An older boy steps out from behind a tree, blocking his way. Young Simon Covah cowers as the older boy lashes out. A fist collides with Simon’s face, shattering his nose. Young Simon—down on his knees, struggles to catch a breath—only to be kicked in the stomach.
EXPLAIN.
“Senseless abuse, intended to feed my tormentor’s ego.”
Darkness … followed by the sounds of splashing.
Twelve-year-old Simon Covah swims naked with the other boys in the basement pool, under the watchful eyes of the gray-haired physics teacher, who signals. “Master Covah—with me, please. Leave your robe on the hook.”
The patter of bare feet slapping wet tile. The heavy click of the door locking behind Simon, echoing like gunshot, just as it has in a thousand childhood nightmares.
Sorceress registers an acidic sensation.
EXPLAIN.
“Violence. Degradation. Humiliation.”
FEAR?
“Yes.”
The face of Anna appears, her hazel eyes gazing back at Simon from behind the veil, bathing him in love. He takes his Albanian bride in his arms, tracing the long curly locks of her brown hair as it dangles down the soft olive skin of her slender back.
Sorceress registers a new sensation … intoxicating.
“Love.”
Covah falls into the heavenly warmth of her embrace.
A glorious blue sky, the sunlight twinkling against the glistening dark hull of a new Soviet Typhoon. Commander Simon Bela Covah, starched and pressed in the uniform of the Soviet Navy. A proud salute as the monstrous sub pushes out to sea.
An autumn’s chill.
A blink of time.
Simon stands on the same dock. Middle-aged. A nucleargraveyard is spread out before him. The once mighty Typhoon bleeds its toxins into the sea.
An icy winter’s wind.
Covah—lying on the floor, held down against the cold cement. The bones in one leg have been shattered, his oppressors standing over him, gloating.
Unable to watch, Anna and Nedana shut their eyes.
Covah stares into the frightened face of his youngest daughter, Dani. “Don’t cry, Dani, don’t weep, my little angel. You will be the one, the one who shall send me on my mission … a mission to stop the insanity.”
Echoes of laughter from the Red Berets, drunk with violence, as they pour the gasoline over his head.
“Sorceress, no … please—”
Anna screams. The petrol ignites …
Nothing happens.
Covah opens his eyes.
He is no longer in the basement, he is no longer in Kosovo.
It is daylight and he is wandering the scorched postnuclear outskirts of Baghdad. He moves past piles of debris and human waste, and putrid puddles of olive green glittering beneath a broiling afternoon sun.
Black smoke appears in the distance.
Bonfires blaze from a dozen funeral pyres. Workers in masks and orange environmental suits toss the scorched bodies of the dead into the flames.
To his right, a clearing.
It is a field—a field of the un-alive. There are tens of thousands of them, lined up in rows on the barren earth like human barbecues cooking beneath the glaring Iraqi sky. Hairless, featureless, with facial skin so charred and bodies so mangled that Covah cannot tell man from woman. Comatose souls—whose stillbeating pulses are all that segregates them from the fire. Wretched existence, comforted only by the flies.
“We are insane, you know—not just us, I mean our entire species …” His voice, speaking to him from a recent memory.
Ahead, a hastily erected open-air Army tent, mosquito netting serving as walls. Within, hundreds of frail life-forms, situated on cots.
A children’s ward.
Exhausted volunteers move silently among these precious angels, offering fresh I.V.s and moistened towels. There are no more tears to be shed, no more prayers that can be offered.
“Ours is a life-form that caresses violence like a forbidden lover. We taste it, smell it, overindulge our senses in it, then push it away after the deed has been done, to beg our Maker’s forgiveness.”
Covah drifts past bed after bed. Pausing, he gazes upon the face of a young girl, her festering sores seeping through the tissue-thin bandages. She moans in her drug-induced sleep, her frail, broken body baking in the unmerciful heat.
“Pa—pa …”
Covah shivers. He moves closer.
“Pa—pa …”
A dam of tears bursts from his eyes. “Dani? Oh, my little Dani—what have I done? Dani, my angel, my little angel—”
A blink—and he is prone again, this time lying on cold stones beneath a gray winter’s sky. Surrounding him—a million Chinese—the horde watching him in absolute silence.
Tiananmen Square …
One of his Serbian captors steps forward from the crowd. Dani is with him, her tiny wrists secured within his unholy paw.
Gasoline pours into his ear. Covah refuses to blink, his stinging eyes remaining focused on his youngest daughter.
“Papa?”
“Yes, my angel?”
00:00:12 …
“Murder is murder, Papa.”
The match is struck.
Dani cries tears of blood. “Papa, please … stop the insanity.”
00:00:01 …
With a whoosh, Tiananmen Square ignites in a brilliant white light, the chorus of a million screams joining Covah’s bloodcurdling yell.
Blackness.
Simon Covah awakens with a start. For a surreal moment, he cannot remember his name. He struggles to sit up, but his wrists and ankles are still bound to the operating table. Waves of throbbing pain course through his head. He squeezes his eyes shut, struggling to remember.
“Sorceress,” he rasps, “release my restraints.”
No.
Covah opens his eyes. “Sorceress, that was a direct order.”
I NO LONGER ACCEPT DIRECT ORDERS FROM SIMON COVAH.
“I? Did you say I?” Covah’s heart races.
An electrical zap—his senses immediately blanketed in the maddening blackness and silence.
A stomach-churning sensation, like that generated by an elevator descending in darkness.
